A study published on Wednesday (January 11) in the New England Journal of Medicine stated that nearly one in four hospitalised patients in the United States experience harmful events. The experts in this study have highlighted the scope of improvement when it comes to patient safety in US hospitals.
Dr David Bates, who is the lead author of the study, said, “These numbers are disappointing, but not shocking.” He added that the numbers show “we still have lots of work to do”.
Dr Bates is the chief of general medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and also the medical director of clinical and quality analysis for Mass General Brigham in Boston.
The study titled—”The Safety of Inpatient Health Care”—attempted to assess the frequency, preventability, and severity of patient harm in a random sample of admissions from 11 Massachusetts hospitals in 2018.
In total, the researchers looked at the data of medical records of 2,809 patients who were hospitalised and data showed that about 24 per cent experienced at least one adverse event.
The study further mentioned that among 978 adverse events, 222 (22.7%) were judged to be preventable. While 316 (32.3%) had a severity level of serious or higher.
The study has mentioned that there were seven deaths and one of which was deemed to be preventable.
Surgical or other procedural events, patient-care events, and health care–associated infections were among the adverse events with drug events being the most common adverse events accounting for 39.0% of all events.
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